CT 2023 School Construction Priority List (CLICK LINK)
State fires hazmat company involved in Diamantis investigation
The state has terminated the contract of a West Haven hazardous
waste remediation company ensnared in the federal
investigation into former state official Konstantinos Diamantis.
The state did not offer any explanation for why the contract
was ended other than “it would be in the best interest of the state.”
AAIS Corp. was one of two companies named in a subpoena by a
federal grand jury investigating Diamantis, who ran the state Office of School
Construction Grants & Review until he retired in October 2021. Municipal
officials have said Diamantis pressured them to hire specific
contractors, construction managers and hazardous waste and asbestos removal
companies, including AAIS.
A CT Mirror investigation last February
revealed that AAIS and a second company, Bestech Inc. of Ellington, got
all but 15 of the 284 purchase orders issued by the state for hazardous waste
disposal and demolition from fiscal year 2017 through February 2022.
The same day the CT Mirror asked questions about the
contract in February 2022, the state Department of Administrative
Services cancelled the contract. Months later, DAS created a new contract that included six vendors, including
AAIS, and later amended it to limit its use.
In a letter dated Jan. 9, 2023, Robert E. Burk, the
Director of Procurement Programs and Services for DAS, informed AAIS officials
they were terminating them from state contract 20PSX0154 effective immediately.
“DAS has determined that it would be in the best interest of
the State of Connecticut to terminate the Contract,” Burk wrote. “I am taking
this action pursuant to the authority granted to me under the Connecticut
General Statutes and, more specifically, the provisions of Section 33 of the
Contract.”
The letter said the termination would take effect the next
day and that there were no jobs left that AAIS needed to complete.
A man who answered the phone at AAIS offices in West Haven
said that the company would have no comment on the state’s decision or whether
they planned to fight it.
The state’s decision to disqualify AAIS comes at a time when
the state Department of Administrative Services is waiting to receive an audit
report about the demolition and abatement contracts that the state
authorized in recent years.
DAS hired Marcum LLP, an independent auditing firm, in
early 2022 to look into those contacts. It paid the firm to review several
dozen abatement contracts and to analyze some of that work to ensure the
contractors didn’t improperly bill the state.
DAS officials told the CT Mirror this week that audit
report was not complete yet.
From the 2017 fiscal year through February 2022, the state
paid about $29.2 million for hazardous waste and asbestos abatement work under
DAS contract 16PSX0110. AAIS received $20.6 million of that and Bestech $8.2
million, purchase orders show — about 98.8% of all the money spent through the
contract.
The state issued 284 purchase orders under the emergency contract. AAIS was named on 214 purchase orders, including exclusive agreements to do work at all state colleges and vocational schools. Some of the work was assigned by other state agencies, such as the Military Department, but the majority were assigned by DAS.
One of the contractors, Haz-Pros, got five jobs.
Environmental Services Inc. got 10. Bestech Inc. got the remaining 55.
DAS contract 20psx0154 added more contractors to the emergency
list. In addition to AAIS, Bestech and Haz-Pros, four new companies are
included: Manafort Brothers Inc., New England Yankee Construction, Omni
Environmental and Stamford Wrecking Company, which had been battling the state
for nearly a year.
The new contract soon included guidelines that placed
restrictions on when towns can hire the companies on the state’s approved list,
including that they can be used only for minor rehabilitation projects that cost
less than $500,000 and “emergency projects,” defined as work that needs to
begin within 24 hours. Demolition projects were explicitly excluded from the
contract.
The original DAS contract was designed to be an on-call
emergency list for towns to use for hazardous waste abatement ranging from
asbestos removal to mold remediation in state buildings.
But under Diamantis, many municipalities started using the
list to bid for hazardous waste removal and demolition on school construction
projects.
A groundbreaking for indoor water park resort adjacent to Foxwoods set for Feb. 1
Brian Hallenbeck
Mashantucket ― Great Wolf Resorts, the Chicago-based
developer known for indoor water parks, will officially break ground here Feb.
1 on a $300 million project adjacent to Foxwoods Resort Casino.
Foxwoods and its owner, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe,
announced Tuesday the Great Wolf Lodge at Mashantucket is scheduled to open in
2025.
The development will take shape on 13 acres of reservation
land between Foxwoods’ Rainmaker entrance and the Pequot Outpost gas
station/convenience store on Foxwoods Boulevard, where some preliminary site
work has taken place. The resort will feature a 91,000-square-foot indoor water
park, a 61,000-square-foot family entertainment center, family restaurants and
lodging.
The Mashantucket development will be Great Wolf’s 23rd North
American resort and its third in the northeastern United States, joining
resorts in Fitchburg, Mass., and in Scotrun, Pa., in the Pocono Mountains.
The tribe first revealed plans for the resort during
Foxwoods’ 30th anniversary celebration last February. At a contract-signing in
March, Great Wolf officials said they expected to start construction this past
summer and complete the project in 2024, a timetable that has been pushed back.
They also said the resort would include a 550-room hotel and
attract up to 600,000 visitors a year from within a 6½-hour drive.
The Mashantuckets originally engaged with Great Wolf in
2007, when the tribe and the developers pursued a plan to build an indoor water
park on tribe-owned, non-reservation land along Route 214 in Ledyard. After
town officials approved a zoning change for the project, it was abandoned in
the face of the Great Recession.
Great Wolf and the tribe also discussed a water park in 2010
and again in 2014.
DANBURY – The new career academy-style high school and
middle school that aims to accommodate 1,400 city students at a refurbished
west side office park will miss its 2024 opening goal and be delayed at least a
year.
“It is no longer a secret about the academies at Danbury
High School and the Cartus site,” said Danbury school Superintendent Kevin
Walston as he told the Board of Education at a meeting earlier this month
that the city’s ambitious
plan to convert a 260,000-square-foot office building into badly
needed classrooms has been set back. “The building is being delayed and will
not open in the 2024-25 school year. The physical school site will not be
opening until 2025-26.”
The information that the city will miss the deadline on the
most important infrastructure project in recent memory was buried in a City Hall-produced video in
mid-December, where City Engineer Antonio Iadarola said, “It looks like we
might be able to hit the 2025 opening for the school.”
The reason for the missed opening date: Negotiations to buy
the hilltop building on Apple Ridge Road ate up too much time. The city
didn’t close on the deal until late November.
Not only was the financing complicated to untangle, but 12
acres of the 24-acre former Cartus office park also had a deed restriction
forbidding its use for anything other than a parking lot, Iadarola said on
Monday.
The city required the seller to get the deed restriction
lifted as a condition of the sale, a process that took months.
“The voters passed the ($164 million career academy) referendum
in June and we had expected to close in July,” Iadarola said.
Danbury closed on the property sale Nov. 26., which made an
August 2024 opening date undoable, he said.
“Although we anticipate being able to finish the project
well before August of 2025, you can’t open up a school of this size in
mid-year,” Iadarola said.
As a result, the Danbury school board and city leaders will
meet Tuesday to discuss next steps.
Roberto Alves, a Democrat running in a
rematch race for mayor against one-term GOP incumbent Dean Esposito,
said the missed opening date for the career academy was a failure of leadership
and a failure of transparency, because City Hall did not inform taxpayers of
the delay.
“This is just a pattern of failure,” Alves said. “This is a
facility that we desperately need, and this is not the first time that there
has been a failure of negotiations.”
Alves was referring to earlier plans for a career academy at
the 1.2-million-square-foot office park known as The Summit, which fell
through in early 2022, forcing City Hall to scramble to find a new
location for classroom space.
An announcement that the city had found a substitute site to
buy that overlooked the Danbury Fair mall took the sting out of the collapsed
negotiations with The Summit, but it put the city on a tight timeline to stay
on the original schedule.
Throughout the second half of 2022, City Hall touted its
revised plans for the west side academy.
But in the end, City Hall’s plan was more ambitious than
successful.
City leaders and school officials will meet in a joint
strategy session on Tuesday to talk about how to provide the career
academy-style curriculum as scheduled in the 2024-25 school year, even though
the building won’t be ready for another year.
Esposito said the larger goals of the career academy are on
track and within reach.
“This deal has been very complex with multiple parties
involved,” he said in a statement. “Through negotiations and the due diligence
required for a deal like this, we have achieved a successful solution for our
city, and now own the Cartus building and have begun Phase One.”
“As mayor, I am determined and focused to create a smooth
transition to the new building, and the new curriculum and will not
jeopardize the education of our students by beginning mid-year of a school
year,” Esposito said. “We will build a school the entire city will be proud of
and have a curriculum that will help our students succeed throughout their
entire lives.”
Wallingford plans to revamp proposal for old train station after not receiving grant
Kate Ramunni
WALLINGFORD — The town will begin working on a new
application for a state Communities Challenge Grant after getting word that it
was not successful in the last funding round.
"We were notified about a week or so ago" that the
town would not be receiving the $1.7 million it applied for to go towards
renovations at the former train station, Wallingford Mayor William
Dickinson Jr. said Tuesday.
"They had handed out a portion of the money and
they indicated we can apply again so we are intending to do that," he
said.
The town was hoping to get the grant, which the town would
match, to do work at the train station to transform it into commercial
space. That work includes exterior roof repairs, exterior brick work,
windows, and the reconfiguration of the interior of the building for
a better floor layout, along with improvements to the mechanical and
electrical systems.
The area around the building, between Quinnipiac Street and
Hall Avenue and bordered by Johanna Manfreda Fishbein Park and the railroad
tracks, is an Incentive Housing Zone. The Planning and Zoning Commission
recently approved increasing the density allowed in parts of the area to 50
units per acre to encourage more housing development there, and the
renovation of the train station is seen as an important part of that
plan.
The state Department of Economic and Community Development
created the Communities Challenge Grant Program to provide funding to
municipalities "to improve livability, vibrancy, convenience and equity of
communities throughout the state," according to its website. It also will
create about 3,000 jobs over the life of the grant program, according to the
website.
The municipalities must match the grant to be eligible.
Eligible projects include transit development, downtown development,
infrastructure and public space improvements and affordable housing
development.
In the description of the program, the DECD encourages
applications that include partnerships between the municipality and
developers.
"DECD encourages public-private partnerships," the
website states. "Eligible entities are welcome to partner with one
or more of the following types of organizations: private developers, business
organizations, other institutions or each other to submit an application."
Dickinson said he'll be reaching out to developers to get
their input and ideas for renovation of the train station.
"We need to get more details to flesh out our
proposal,” he said. “We will be looking to talk to some developers and develop
a more defined project, especially with what the role of the developer would
be.
“Other funding options that we are aware of deal with
historic building type grants, but they require you to not change the
use," Dickinson said. "You have to commit to a given use for 20
years. We're actually proposing a change of use for the railroad station."
Other grant opportunities are generally much smaller in
scale, he said. "We're applying for $1.7 million. That's a much larger
amount of money than any of the other grants that I'm aware of."
The next round of Community Challenge Grants will be given
out in the spring, and the town intends to apply in that cycle as well,
Dickinson said.
Westport considers redistricting, new middle school model
WESTPORT — School officials are looking at the possibility
of redistricting to address the overcrowding at Long Lots Elementary Schools,
which might also mean changing how the grades are split between the middle
schools.
Long Lots has more than 600 students, making it the
district's largest elementary school. To
help address this in the short-term, officials
approved adding two modular units at the school for the next school
year. School board members suggested redistricting as an alternative to the
modulars in the coming years as officials determine whether
Long Lots should be built new or renovated.
The building committee is expected to make a decision around
June, Board of Education Chair Lee Goldstein said at this week's school board
meeting.
"Until we know what is happening with Long Lots, I
don't think we can make any sort of meaningful plan," Goldstein said about
the redistricting.
Superintendent Thomas Scarice said the construction for Long
Lots likely wouldn't be completed until September 2027. He proposed September
2025 as a potential time to redistrict, with multiple board members saying they
do not support it occurring in 2024, including Christina Torres and Kevin
Christie.
Before any other steps, Scarice said they must first have a
key decision for Long Lots and Coleytown Elementary School, which may also need
a rebuild, determine where Stepping Stones Preschool will be located and
conduct a capacity study on the schools.
Board Member Robert Harrington was one of the members who
pushed for the redistricting discussion, saying that however it occurs, it
needs to be "thought out and communicated."
Scarice said community input needs to be considered before
and after he recommends a redistricting plan to the board.
Some of the other key details within the redistricting
Scarice mentioned include ample notice to families whose schools may change,
looking at potentials for grandfathering some students into the school,
reanalyzing start times and conducting a traffic study.
Board Secretary Neil Phillips said that they could look at
programming from kindergarten through fifth grade, which led to a discussion
about reconfiguring the middle schools. Currently, certain elementary schools
feed into certain middle schools.
Hordon said she is in support of the grades six through
eight model in the middle schools, though she has heard some parents say that
there is an imbalance in programming. such as extracurricular activities, at
Coleytown Middle School compared to Bedford Middle School because of the size
difference.
One of the options would be to have a sixth-grade only
middle school and then a seventh and eighth grade school. Scarice said a
drawback of this is that it adds another transition between schools for
students.
Board of Education Vice Chair Liz Heyer said she would like
to see a clear set of primary goals established for redistricting and that she
doesn't want the ideas to be overcomplicated.
Torres said they also need to consider the effects of the
COVID-19 pandemic on elementary students, social emotional wellbeing and mental
health. She recommended giving students an extra year or two of
consistency, as many are still lacking in social skills from the
pandemic.
"Moving kids does impact more than just the family of
the students who are moving, but also their friends who may be staying,"
she said.